Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 6th April 2026 The new record from Boston’s crusty hardcore grindpunk Dystopiate is the work of Chris Maillet, a New England underground lifer by the look of his Metal Archives page, most notably work in ambient industrial black metal project Cryostasium (on writing this review, I discovered I actually have a Cryostasium album in my collection and had no memory of how I got it). But ‘Filth Film’ has much more of a grind and punk approach to its blackened…

Elections come and go. I would be hard-pressed to count precisely how many elections, midterm elections, primary elections, and special elections I’ve participated in. But if I can vote in an election, I do. I’ve voted for Jessie Jackson and John McCain. One of those I’m still proud of. At heart I am a kind of centrist. I tend to seek a middle way. At worst, this tends to make my opinions lukewarm: neither too hot nor too cold. But as I have aged I have found myself more frustrated with the…

Do you know what you want to be doing? I think about when we do have the rare time to sit down and figure out what we want to do with the precious free time we have, where do we end up allocating it to? During the new year, we tell ourselves the multitude of "good" things we want to start doing. Taking better care of our one and only body, finally quit drinking, learn how to meditate, or a new language, or start an embroidery and crochet Etsy. Maybe finally visit a new continent. But when push…

SWITCH COFFEE TOKYO is a popular coffee shop about a 10 minute walk from Meguro station, along the Meguro river. They’ve been around since 2013 (which is pretty ancient by third-wave coffee standards in Tokyo), and also have a second, smaller store near Yoyogi-Hachiman station. I’ve visited SWITCH a couple of times, and what immediately strikes me about this place is that there is a real community feel to this cafe. On both the recent times I visited, mums had stopped by with their prams for a…

When I pulled out the 2024 Hobonichi Cousin Avec (Part 2) a month ago I realized I need to get a planner for next year. I find it incredibly useful to have a week plan and a daily plan. Ideally always visible. The weekly layout of the A5 Hobonichi have always worked great for me. And the daily have been useful for a place to have the most important things for today. There are two options I’m considering before I pull the plug and order something in November The first one is to continue with a…

Suddenly I find that my daily eBay search for typewriters is cluttered with hundreds of terrible AI-generated images, available to order as prints on canvas. When I say terrible, I mean 2023 quality, which could practically be considered medieval by today's AI standards. Who is generating these things? And who, if anyone, is buying them?By the way, some folks seem to have gotten the impression that the MAINSPRINGS project is encouraging the use of AI. No! Some AI may be allowed if it's honest…

Tripp Mickle, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian Barnes, and Ana Swanson, reporting for The New York Times: Nvidia said on Sunday that it was opening an investigation into Jensen Huang, its chief executive and co-founder, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined was a Chinese spy. Mr. Huang’s relationship with the woman, who goes by Alice Huang, became a U.S. government concern after surveillance…

On the blog this week, we’re considering the emotion of relief, which tends to be both intense and overlooked. Add your perspective here. You know pub day is approaching when… The Amazon paperback version of A Gentleman of Very Few Words is already available. Order your copy here. Look for a print version of A Gentleman in Winter in the next week or so. I’m told that An Heir of Distinction (Bad Heir Day Tales, book five) has gone into audio production. The instant I spot the pre-order links,…

I covet secrets, just like everybody, because avarice catharsis paranoia something something. You don't need me to write about it because we already have V., The Assault, Incendies, and Robert Caro. But musically-minded goofballs who eschew the Great Tapestry of History narratives know there's something else you can play that doesn't involve any war crimes. Hunting mystery songs is the best game ever! A sound/lyric/melody fragment to a music nerd is like a collapsing dam to Superman, or a…

# Remembering the fallen. Lest we forget. # On my neurodiversity Growing up through the 70s and into the 80s, there was no talk about neurodiversity. Although certain conditions had been described years before, they didn't enter into mainstream conversation until the late 80s/early 90s. Even then they were discussed with very negative connotations — disease, disorder. I remember when the movie Rain Man came out depicting a specific instance of autism but all anyone talked about was savants as…

We’re in to November, which only has three recordings saved for the whole month. That definitely feels like I’m missing a hard drive somewhere. Today’s recording is another episode of Sarah Jane’s Alien Files. This episode is presented by Sarah Jane herself. The programme features the Slitheen. The Blathereen. And Rakweed. Media Centre Description: Sarah Jane Smith opens the Alien Files – the ultimate guide to everything you could possibly need to know when facing hostile aliens. Sarah Jane has…

The very engaging DUPLICITY (2009), a tale of corporate spies in love, has just been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.I first reviewed this film here way back in 2009, and I enjoyed it just as much on this revisit.Julia Roberts, always a favorite of mine, and Clive Owen play the referenced spies, whose relationship and goals only become clear gradually, as the story switches back and forth in time.When you come down to it, Roberts' and Owen's characters are really rather awful people,…

I've got a post which, for some reason, is loved by AI crapbots. I've gotten multiple comments that were clearly created by not a human in an effort to...something? I'm not sure. They've been sitting in my moderation queue for some time just because I wanted to do something to shame the submitters even though I know they're not looking. Anyways, all comments go into a Pending queue on my admin page so I can manually mark them as approved or not. I added a spam toggle on the dashboard that marks…

On reflection Quote of the Day ”Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” Mark Twain Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Tom Rush | What’s Wrong with America Link Wonderful. Long Read of the Day What do you get if you make AI eat its own words? Not what you originally asked for My recent Observer column Here’s an experiment you probably can’t try at home. Take a large language model (LLM) and prompt it with a passage about…

“Voting in a Garage” by coolmikeol, CC BY 2.0. A few of us on Bluesky have been discussing what SF’s November 3 election results mean. I have thoughts and speculations about what this means, so I dug in. One easy, accurate thing I saw and could share: what GOP voters in San Francisco voted for. #Who are we talking about here? Six statewide races featured a Republican against a Democrat. 10% of SF’s mail ballots (details below) voted for the Republican in 5 or 6 of those races. It’s safe to call…

I had classes for Machine Learning in the Physical World on reinforcement learning and Digital Signal Processing on Software-Defined Radio. I did some more textbook reading for DSP and made some progress on my assignments. Overall it was a little less productive than I liked, but hopefully tomorrow I can make some more rapid progress. Until tomorrow.

I just got home after spending the afternoon and evening with J and A and this sensational remake of a video game masterpiece. This game is beautiful, the soundtrack has so much depth and nuances, the controls are snappy, script and voice acting are top-notch, and everything—from cutting grass to defeating bosses, from talking to townsfolk to exploring every last corner of this mesmerizing world—feels juicy and satisfying as hell. The atmosphere they created, the attention to detail in…

I’ve just taken down blog posts from June 2011 and earlier, at least for the moment. These were leftover pages published via Blogger and Movable Type platforms that are no longer in operation, which means… More

A couple of weeks ago, we reproduced the text of a paper headed “Reform of the Office of Lord Mayor” which Alder Martha Grekos wrote and distributed to all elected members of the City of London Council (comprising 100 Councillors and 25 Alders), senior officers of the Council, the Livery, the All Party Parliamentary Group (“APPG”) conducting a survey on the future of the Council, the Chairs of the City Residents’ Associations, and national and local journalists. We then illustrated one of the…

Dr. Fisherian’s Runaway Machine by Chris Wollard The Dogpatch neighborhood in San Francisco is on the east side of the city, along the waterfront. The shoreline was industrialized in the 1880s, but the big shipyard there closed decades ago. It was a cool neighborhood to walk around! A lot of interesting old buildings that have been adapted instead of being destroyed, which is great — old warehouses have tons of windows and skylights, and apparently back in the day even industrial buildings…

Contrary to popular belief, London continues to be a city of manufacturing and MADE IN LONDON by Carmel King & Mark Brearley with additional text by Clare Dowdy, presents a wealth of inspiring examples, many of which have been running for generations – it is my delight to publish this East London selection today. Mark Brearley is giving an illustrated lecture on the subject of MADE IN LONDON at this year’s BLOOMSBURY JAMBOREE on Sunday November 15th at 11:00 am. CLICK HERE TO BOOK Blackhorse…

Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. At the start of October Coyote released their latest album, “Go With The Tide”. It’s a 7-track dive into the familiar, dubby,, cosmic Balearica that they’re known for, but once again the duo come up with some tunes that really know how to stick themselves to you… and again demonstrate that with Coyote repeated plays are everything: what might at first sound simple often has many layers and details that only reveal themselves gradually. “Palo…

Maybe I should not even write the post and let the title baffle the world. I can leave it to the GenAI comment spambots to derive meaning from that. No, there is a path here, though how it was traverse is the kind of stuff vectorized thinking would never get to. In a group email, some folks I know were asked to share photos of landscapes. One person replied they were left out since they took many photos, but never landscapes. I tried to make a case like the DS106 Daily Create way of creating…

OK, so I suck at updating my website. I also suck at blogging. I have so many partially written posts in Joplin I recently had to delete some of them because the topic has shifted so much that they weren't really relevant anymore. I want to get better at this, but my brain is kind of broken. So instead of writing anything meaningful, I'll write about website updates and life updates and call it good until I can finish literally anything. Website Updates I nuked the entire photos section.…

The Royal Gorge Bridge spans Royal Gorge near Cañon City, Colorado. The post On the Bridge appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Took my camera along to check out the Canberra kinetic sculpture race on the weekend. Despite the weather being a little sketchy and the wind threatening to blow a few of the vehicles into the lake, I had the best of times. the Canberra Kinetic Sculpture Race celebrates the joyful act of reimagining what vehicles and public art can be. At a time when technology often feels overwhelming and automated systems dominate daily life, these handmade, human-powered machines offer a playful form of…

And should Peacock's two-parter on overlooked evidence in the Simpson case have bothered in the first place?

The idea of finite geometries sounds like an oxymoron the first time you hear of it, something like dry water or cold fire, but the axioms of some kinds of geometry can indeed be satisfied by finite models. The axioms of projective plane geometry are as follows. Any two distinct points lie on exactly one line. Any two distinct lines meet in exactly one point. There exist four points, no three of which are collinear. The most famous example of a finite projective plane is the Fano plane. It…

Wow, that was quite a ride! Without knowing much about this series I had taken book 1 at “face value” and seen it is a complex and powerful story with the romance between Feyre and Tamlin at its heart and their eventual union as the happy ending everyone deserved. So to come to this second book and have everything that we thought was true turned on its head was really something, especially as we can see the hints that were planted in the first book. I’d be fascinated to know how far in advance…

Dinner in progress. Listening to Cream…